For nearly two years a new $15 million building meant to house a state-of-the-art, solar cell production line has stood empty on the main campus of the University of NSW in Sydney.

Its main function? Students use it to take exams.

On Thursday UNSW vice-chancellor
Fred Hilmer
finally tackled the white elephant, saying the $20 million project the showcase building was meant to house, the Solar Industrial Research Facility, is “on hold".

He blamed continued cost increases, difficult conditions in the solar voltaic cell industry and the federal government’s cuts to university research funding that it announced on Monday.

But the project has faced severe difficulties for years. It was originally announced with great fanfare in March 2009, when UNSW said it was teaming up with Roth & Rau, a German supplier of solar cell manufacturing equipment, to establish a pilot solar cell production line at UNSW.

However the promised equipment, which was being donated by Roth & Rau, was never installed. One reason was the escalating cost of installing the equipment and its support infrastructure, had not been allowed for.

But in spite of this uncertainty, the university pressed on with the futuristic building to house the production facility.

Professor Hilmer justified the decision to go ahead with the building even though the other elements of the project were not in place.

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“It [the building] wasn’t going to be a waste space under any scenario," he said. “We’ve been using that building since the time it has been finished. It’s good exam space, you need flat open space for that."

He said had not been worried about going ahead with the building because the university was “desperately short of engineering space".

“It's a very good home for mechanical [engineering]," he said.

The demise of the project is a major setback for the university’s photovoltaic cell research program, one of UNSW’s showcase research areas which has won world recognition. The facility was to have helped develop UNSW’s silicon solar cell technologies “from laboratory processes to factory-ready industrial processes".

UNSW’s original 2009 announcement of the project said: “As a world-class research facility it is also expected to attract top-level research students to UNSW."

Professor Hilmer said he was not sure if a $5 million grant for the project from the federal government, through the Australian Solar Institute, had been received. But if it had, it would be returned, he said.